Conceptual Framework free essay sample

Joseph Cornell Artist This internationally renowned modern artist never had professional training. He was first and foremost a collector. He loved to scour old book shops and secondhand stores of new York looking for souvenirs, theatrical memorabilia, old prints and photographs, music scores, and French literature. Joseph Cornell was born on Christmas Eve 1903. He was the oldest of four children born to Helen and Joseph Cornell. He had two sisters, Betty and Helen, and a brother, Robert. Cornell grew up in a grand house in Nyack, New York, a picturesque Victorian town on the Hudson River. Cornells parents shared their love of music, ballet, and literature with their children. Evenings were spent around the piano, or listening to music on the family Victrola. Trips to New York meant vaudeville shows in Times Square or magic acts at the Hippodrome. His father often returned from his job in Manhattan with new sheet music, silver charms, or a pocket full of candy. But Cornells childhood was not without sadness. His brother, born with cerebral palsy, was confined to a wheelchair. Joseph, who was extremely attached to Robert, became his principal caretaker. Artwork By collecting and carefully juxtaposing found objects in small, glass-front boxes, Cornell created visual poems in which surface, form, texture, and light play together. Using things we can see, Cornell made boxes about things we cannot see: ideas, memories, fantasies, and dreams. Turned everyday objects into mysterious treasures. In Homage to the Romantic Ballet, plastic ice cubes become jewels when set in a velvet-lined box, souvenirs of a famous ballerinas midnight performance on the frozen Russian steppe. A small glass jar filled with colored sand is transformed into powdered gold from a Mayan temple, preserved in Cornells Museum.? A symbolist, Cornell used the found materials that inhabit his boxes paper birds, clay pipes, clock springs, balls, and rings. A metal spring from a discarded wind-up clock may evoke the passage of time, a ball might represent a planet or the luck associated with playing a game. Although his constructions are enveloped in nostalgia the longing for something that happened long ago and far away and their appearance is thoroughly modern. Whilst containing a heavy amount of nostalgia Cornell’s work to me has always seemed to focus on beauty and dreams. Looking at his boxes is like looking into different world, a world where you play with your memories and where anything is  possible. The act of juxtaposing these beautiful and old found objects makes them come to life again. There, enclosed in those rectangle boxes, they scream out poetry and become precious. It is obvious Cornell was obsessed with the beauty of the female figure. World Joseph Cornell has influenced generations of teachers in the UK. His philosophy and activities have also become a key component for our country’s Religious Education Environment Program. † Artistic influences included Dada artists Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters, and Surrealist Max Ernst; other influences were his interest in ballet, music and literature. Audience His work was admired by many of the leading artists of his time, and he had shows at the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Duchamp also enlisted his help in compiling a dossier on his lifes work. Robert Raushenberg Artwork Rauschenberg saw beauty in the everyday, putting objects into his art that others would consider trash. In doing so, he redefined art as the common things that surround people every day, paving the way for movements like Pop and Conceptual Art. For him, painting entailed not only using a brush, but also silkscreening, collaging, transferring, and imprinting, and he did so on the widest array of materials from canvas, board, and fabric to sheet metal, Plexiglas, plaster, and paper. For example Mr. Rauschenberg’s work gave new meaning to sculpture. Canyon,† for instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. â€Å"Monogram† was a stuffed Angora goat girdled by a tire atop a painted panel. â€Å"Bed† entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint, as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. They all became icons of postwar modernism. Rauschenberg continued experimenting with prints by printing onto aluminum, moving plexiglass disks, clothes, and other surfaces. He challenged the view of the artist as auteur by assembling engineers to help in the production of pieces technologically designed to incorporate the viewer as an active participant in the work. He also created performance pieces centered around chance. To watch dancers on roller-skates (â€Å"Pelican†, 1963) or to hear the sound of a gong every time a tennis ball was hit (â€Å"Open Score†, 1966), was to witness an art that exchanged lofty ambitions for a sense of excitement and playfulness while retaining meaning. Artist A native of Port Arthur, Texas, Robert Rauschenberg was born on October 22, 1925. After briefly attending the University of Texas at Austin to study pharmacology, and serving in the United States Navy during World War II, he enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1947. In early 1948, he traveled to Paris to study at the Academie Julien, where he met fellow artist Susan Weil; they later married and had a son, Christopher. In the autumn, the couple returned to the United States to study under Josef Albers at Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina until the spring of 1949. Later that year, Rauschenberg moved to New York City and enrolled at the Art Students League. Rauschenberg returned to Black Mountain College in 1951 and again in 1952 when he formed friendships with Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and David Tudor, and participated in Cage? Theater Piece #1, which is now acknowledged as the first Happening. Since the early 50s, Rauschenberg? s sustained involvement in theatre and dance has resulted in costume and set designs for Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Viola Farber, Steve Paxton, and Trisha Brown, as well as for his own productions. World? Rauschenbergs work of the 1950s and 1960s influenced the young artists who developed later M odern movements. Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein traced their inspiration for Pop art to Rauschenbergs collages of appropriated media images, and his experiments in silkscreen printing. The foundation for Conceptual art in large measure lay in Rauschenbergs belief that the artist had the authority to determine the definition of art. The most fitting example is his 1961 portrait of Iris Clert for an exhibition at her gallery in Paris, which consisted of a telegram: This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so/ Robert Rauschenberg. The happenings of the 1960s trace their lineage to Rauschenbergs early Events in collaboration with John Cage at Black Mountain College as well as his later theater pieces. His early artwork inspired other artists with the freedom of possibility that they could not find in Abstract Expressionist painting. Audience ? Critics agree that Rauschenbergs later works were not as influential, but his continued commercial success allowed him to support emerging artists. He co-founded Artists Rights Today (ART) to lobby for artists royalties on re-sales of their work, after observing the gains made by early collectors with the boom in the art market. In 1970, he co-founded Change, Inc. , which helped struggling artists pay their medical bills. He became more politically active as he grew older, testifying on behalf of artists for the National Endowment of the Arts in the 1990s. His undying energy is at the root of his success as an artist and as a spokesman for artists In 1951, Rauschenberg produced his monochromatic White Paintings referred to by some critics as hypersensitive screens which registered the smallest adjustments in lighting and atmosphere on their surface, and by sceptics as blank canvases. While his work often enraged Abstract Expressionists and critics, his imagery and methods profoundly influenced Pop, Conceptual, and other late Modern artists.